7 Technology Architecture Mistakes That Pull Costs Up and Ruin Productivity

Technology is ever evolving, and maintaining an effective technology architecture requires strategic planning and consistent reassessment. Common but avoidable pitfalls can hamper your efforts.

We’ve highlighted 7 critical technology architecture mistakes along with the strategies and methodologies you can use to sidestep these blunders.

Incorporating technology on-the-go

The usual practice for many businesses is adding modules and services as they grow. But after a while, your efficiency starts to suffer thanks to too many modules that were never adequately integrated. When expanding, keep a long-range view of how you’ll scale, sync, and manage new tech that is added along the way.

Wavestone helps clients develop effective digital strategies with a complete analysis of the company’s IT environment to ensure efficient growth strategies, product implementation, and optimization, beginning with a tech-forward digital roadmap.

Accepting a vendor that ends up requiring too many accommodations by you

Unless your architecture is purposefully designed to be compatible across all vendors, you should assess vendors according to how well they fit into your business needs and not fit your architecture around their solutions.

One way to manage this analysis is to deploy a vendor management office (VMO) to align strategic and tactical business objectives for elite tech integration and execution. Wavestone’s VMO capability development process includes strategy assessment and design, implementation and optimization, and ongoing management and support to help clients develop a self-funding vendor management organization.

Playing down the role of off-the-shelf industry standards and products

Avoid spending time and resources developing in-house solutions when you can easily integrate readily available products into your technology stack. People are not always willing to accept that they can use the same core solution as others. Don’t fall into this trap. We refer to this as buying versus building. Invest your energies where you find a higher ROI.

Committing to too many “integrated” solutions from vendors

Believe it or not, companies use only half of their applications daily, wasting resources and reducing efficiencies. Free modules offered by vendors can be tempting but ill-advised. Maintenance costs continue to rise over time as more tools and modules are added without actually benefitting operations. Just because it’s free doesn’t mean you should take it.

Related to this warning is ensuring you involve multiple vendors and not become overly committed to a single vendor that offers multiple solutions. Aim for a vendor-neutral architecture that prioritizes your company’s needs and choose best-of-breed solutions from an array of vendors. This helps your company achieve an effective resource mix of top-notch solutions.

Wavestone assists clients in optimizing their application portfolio, removing obsolete, redundant, and outdated applications to maximize IT resource utilization.

Our application rationalization methodology helps you simplify, modernize, and transform IT organizations to:

Ignoring technological convergence

Reusing technology and converging two or more technologies into a single system is an obvious way to reduce costs. However, when companies add non-scalable solutions for immediate results without proper forethought, you end up with crowded systems that are poorly integrated, which both wastes valuable resources and hinders future growth.

Optimal reuse and convergence will maximize value by driving lower costs, greater agility, and superior quality. A well-constructed services strategy can potentially reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) by over 40%.

Overly relying on front-end systems to serve critical capabilities

While front-end components can achieve results for most functions, scalability becomes limited as they become more complex. Rather than allow your front-end to become a monolithic liability, relying on back-end engines for business logic is always better.

Create a clear delineation: focus the front-end components on providing user interface capabilities such as interaction workflows, presentation level integration, and accessing the back-end business processes via services.

Introducing unnecessary complexity across your range of technologies

Given a choice between a technology already supported by your company and a competitive option, you have to assess the benefits of sticking to one that you know or determine if you get a more powerful performance or more scalable solutions by adding something new.

In other words, what seems simple – continuing with one vendor – may actually be harmful. Reducing complexity is not solely about reducing your tech vendor count or using only one programming language. The key is to strive for simplicity in your solutions without becoming overly simplistic in your strategy